Word: kumin
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...thought, well, I can’t be a poet. I’ll have to be something else—maybe a literary critic,” Kumin remembers...
...least I could write iambic pentameter,” Kumin says. But Stegner was profoundly unimpressed. “Say it in flowers, but for god’s sake, don’t write any more poems,” Stegner told the Radcliffe first-year. The words stung...
...first semester at Radcliffe College, Kumin, who had just turned 17, placed into an advanced writing course taught by Wallace Stegner. Stegner would garner critical acclaim one year later for his largely autobiographical novel “The Big Rock Candy Mountain,” but when Kumin first met him, he was still a relatively obscure member of Harvard’s English Department. Stegner’s sharp-tongued manner of speaking to students, as Kumin recalls, belied the sensitive prose that would define his fiction in later years...
...decade after the Stegner setback, Kumin would mostly keep her verses private. But although Stegner’s crass criticism might have stifled Kumin’s development as a writer, it also taught her a valuable lesson: “never, never, ever to put a student down that way. And I’m pleased to say I never have,” testifies Kumin, whose long teaching career has included posts at over a dozen schools, including Brandeis, Columbia, MIT, and Princeton...
...Ultimately, Kumin says, “I forgave him, but by then he had died.” During Stegner’s life, Kumin says, “our paths never crossed.” At one point, the two writers’ career trajectories did come quite close to intersecting. Stegner won the Pulitzer Prize for fiction in 1972; Kumin won the Pulitzer for poetry the following year...